The Evaluative Lexicon: Adjective use as a means of assessing and distinguishing attitude valence, extremity, and emotionality

The language – in particular, the adjectives – individuals use can be harnessed to understand the different aspects of their attitudes. The present research introduces a novel approach to measuring attitudes that allows researchers to quantify these aspects. In Study 1, we created a list of 94 evaluative adjectives and asked participant judges to rate the implied valence, extremity, and emotionality of each adjective. This approach allowed us to quantify each adjective along these dimensions and thereby create the Evaluative Lexicon (EL). We validated the EL in Study 2 by experimentally creating attitudes toward novel stimuli in the lab and then measuring them using our tool. In Study 3, we sought to further validate the EL as well as demonstrate its practical and theoretical contributions using a natural-text repository of 5.9 million Amazon.com product reviews. Results from the Amazon.com reviews indicate that individuals use the EL adjectives in ways that further validate their ability and usefulness in measuring valence, extremity, and emotionality even within natural text. These findings, in turn, produced new theoretical contributions regarding the separability of attitude extremity and emotionality as well as their relation to summaries of both univalent and ambivalent evaluations. The findings highlight the importance of attitude emotionality for understanding attitude expressions.